Trippin’ on the Shoestring is back from vacation and ready to take on a heavy topic: how we as a society respond to those in our communities experiencing crisis. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 renewed national calls for better crisis response models to reduce aggressive and sometimes fatal interactions that result when police are the ones showing up to the scene. Municipalities locally here in the Connecticut River Valley and nationally have begun to adopt various crisis-response models in answer to this mounting public pressure. 

We sat down with two guests to talk about what is happening at the state level here in Massachusetts around these crisis response models. We were joined by Sera Davidow, an author, filmmaker, and director of the Wildflower Alliance – a national training and peer support organization rooted in harm reduction. We were also joined by Earl Miller, the director of community supports at Wildflower Alliance. He is the former director of the civilian-response department that began operations last year in the town of Amherst, the Community Responders for Equity, Safety, and Service, also known as CRESS.